


Crypthand

by Ladybug_21



Category: Gentleman Jack (TV), The Bletchley Circle
Genre: Bletchley Park, F/F, World War II, codebreakers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21568906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Deciphering crypthand made Lucy feel closer to Anne Lister than she had ever felt to anyone in her life.
Relationships: Anne Lister (1791-1840)/Ann Walker (1803-1854), Lucy Davis & Millie Harcourt, Lucy Davis & Susan Gray, Susan Gray/Millie Harcourt
Comments: 2
Kudos: 53





	Crypthand

**Author's Note:**

> I'm quite surprised that no one else has already written this, because Sophie Rundle! I own no rights to either of these franchises.

It all began when Millie decided to drag Susan and Lucy to West Yorkshire for a weekend.

"My dad has an old school friend there who's like an uncle to me, he can put us up," she promised them, the rain pattering on the roof of their little hut as the three women sat on the floor next to each other. "Be nice to get away from the old Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society for a bit, won't it? Go dancing, have a nice warm dinner, hopefully seek out company a bit more scintillating than the typical boffins and debs..."

Susan, her knees drawn up to her chest and her head leaned back against the mattress of her bed, hummed her assent at Millie.

"Won't Miss McBrien be angry with us?" Lucy asked, her eyes wide. She was new, only a few weeks into the job, and still didn't know which rules could be broken safely.

"If she is, you can blame it all on me," said Millie grandly with her signature warm wildness, throwing an arm around Lucy.

Lucy smiled. She'd never met anyone like Millie before, who was so utterly fearless even at the thought of Miss McBrien becoming truly angry, which was a sight that Lucy had seen once and hoped never to see again.

Millie's dad's old school friend, it turned out, worked at a museum at an old estate in Halifax. And, because he worked there, he was allowed to show his visitors things that weren't technically supposed to exist.

"See these?" he said in a theatrically hushed voice, pulling away a wall to reveal a shelf crammed with leather-bound tomes. "These are the _very_ secret diaries of one of the former owners of Shibden, from a hundred years ago. Can you girls keep a secret?"

"I daresay we can," answered Millie with a smile and a wink in Lucy's direction.

"They were supposed to be burned," said Millie's dad's friend, pulling one off of the shelf and blowing a bit of dust off of its cover. "Scandalous things recorded in here, apparently. Not that anyone can read them anymore, of course."

Millie, being Millie, cavalierly pulled a tome off of the shelf and flipped it open.

"Seems quite easy to read to me, other than the spindly handwriting," she remarked, flipping the pages. Suddenly, she stopped. "Susan."

Susan peered over Millie's shoulder, her placid face creased by a little frown.

"Goodness," was all that Susan said.

"There, you see?" Their guide looked very pleased with himself. "Crypthand, it's called. The last of the Listers, Mr John, apparently managed to crack some of it, but he was so shocked that he threw away the key and shut the books away. I seem to remember that you were fond of puzzles as a child, Millie..."

"Oh, don't look at me, Susan's the one here who's remarkably good at them," Millie explained as Susan flipped over the page, her brow still furrowed. "Although this certainly doesn't look like any that we've ever tried to solve together, does it. Lucy, darling, care to take a look?"

Millie said it so casually, but Lucy could already detect the meaning under her friend's words. She took the book from Susan and flipped quickly through about thirty pages' worth of the tome, before saying, "Very interesting," and handing it back to Millie's dad's friend.

"Remember, not a word to anyone," he said in a conspiratorial whisper, as he closed the hidden bookcase up behind the wall.

Back at Bletchley Park the next evening, after a weekend's worth of dancing and merriment in West Yorkshire, Millie rummaged about under her bed for some loose sheafs of paper.

"Can you remember it?" she asked, dropping down next to Lucy on the floor and holding out the papers and a pen.

Lucy nodded, took the pen, and quickly began to write.

"But I don't know what any of it means," she said timidly, when she had finished writing out the first two pages.

"Algebra," murmured Susan, her finger tracing a line.

"And Greek." Millie leaned her head over Susan's shoulder. "What a lark! Pity this bloke's dead; he wouldn't even need Enigma to send messages that not even Ultra could crack! Susan, what do you think? Substitution?"

"Except the ciphertext likely doesn't map onto the plaintext one-to-one." Susan's face had taken on a far-off look, as it so often did when her mind was whirring as fast as a rotor. "Let me think."

"While you do, I'm going to read the bits scrawled in messy English." Millie flung herself back onto her bed with the page that Susan wasn't reading. "Hmm. Coal mining. Riveting enough to spend an entire page on, apparently."

"Perhaps it was his livelihood?" Lucy offered, sitting down on her own bed.

" _Her_ livelihood, apparently," Millie corrected. (Susan, still kneeling on the floor of the hut, had begun scribbling in the margins of her page and was paying absolutely no attention to conversation going on above her head.)

And Lucy thought that that was simply wonderful, that there had been women operating in code in England long before the GC&CS—long before the grand house at Bletchley Park even existed, probably! She began writing out the rest of the pages, just to be able to read them clearly and see what the woman who wrote in crypthand had to say about the world back then.

The woman's name was Anne Lister, and she was indeed the owner of Shibden Hall. She was witty, sometimes biting in her criticisms of others, with a mind that could manage a dozen projects at once, and a wanderlust that seemed to always be planning her next big adventure. The coded bits still remained a mystery to Lucy, but Susan was working on them diligently every night, occasionally asking Lucy to confirm a line of algebra, Millie nestled beside Susan to offer thoughts about the Greek letters or the zodiac symbols that sometimes appeared wedged into a line of crypthand. (Susan knew very little about zodiac symbols because she didn't believe in horoscopes, but Millie knew all of the ins and outs of horoscopes and offered extensive opinions that left Susan laughing with quiet bemusement.)

"Lucy, where _is_ your head today?" Miss McBrien chided her one evening, and Lucy realised that she had stopped writing out a line of data mid-figure because she was thinking about Anne Lister again.

"I'm sorry," Lucy stammered, trying to remember where she was and what she was doing, since it was clear she wasn't actually at Shibden.

"One would think you'd stumbled across a new beau, the way you're letting your mind drift." Miss McBrien shook her head slightly, suppressing a smile, and moved away.

And maybe Miss McBrien was right, Lucy conceded. When Harry had first asked her to take a walk with him, and given her a bouquet of hand-picked flowers at the end of their afternoon together, Lucy had felt rather like she did now—all fluttery and breathless and unable to think of anything else. These days, she tried not to turn her mind towards Harry, fighting somewhere off in Italy, because it was too frightening to imagine what might be happening to him. Anne Lister was a much safer subject on which to focus all of her thoughts outside of Hut Four. And Lucy found that she didn't really care to think about much else, not when her friends were equally absorbed in attempting to reveal the fascinating woman's secrets.

Lucy had heard of codebreakers who developed something approaching affection for the operators whose transmissions they frequently deciphered. There were always telltale hints in the transmissions, they said—hints that betrayed the humanity of the senders, glowing warm and familiar beneath the hard, cold military jargon and coordinates, a tiny window into the other person's mind. But Lucy had never understood why decoding one person's thoughts over and over again should create a feeling of intimacy.

Deciphering crypthand, however, made Lucy feel closer to Anne Lister than she had ever felt to anyone in her life.

She fancied she could imagine what Anne Lister would be like. A genius for figures and sums, no doubt, like Susan. Strict and authoritative in her sharp black wardrobe, like Miss McBrien. But also wild and daring, always dashing off on some new adventure halfway across the globe, like Millie. A fantastic mélange of all of the women Lucy admired most in the world.

Lucy imagined that Anne Lister would be absolutely wonderful.

"Lucy, can you give me the last line of page five again?" Susan asked one evening, sighing as she set aside yet another false cipher in a stack on the floor.

"Check-three-upsilon-two-four-rho-three-rho-equal sign-three-omega," Lucy recited, and Susan wrote it all down, blinked hard, then snatched another piece of paper off of a fresh stack and began writing out a new cipher.

"You got it?" Millie asked. She was lying on her stomach on her bed, smoking, but she scooted over so that she could rest her chin on Susan's shoulder, her cigarette dangling from her fingers and wreathing both herself and Susan in a blue haze as Susan sat back and re-read the line.

"I think so," gasped Susan. "Lucy, that page, please?"

Lucy handed over the requested page, and Susan disengaged her shoulder from Millie's chin, leaning forward so that she could begin writing the plaintext beneath the lines of crypthand. All of a sudden, however, Susan's flawlessly uniform skin flushed pink, her pen suspended above the paper.

"What is it?" Millie asked, one hand now propping up her chin as she blew out a ring of smoke.

"It's..." Susan cleared her throat delicately. "I can see why your friend called it shocking."

Millie rolled off the edge of her bed and onto the floor next to Susan. She leaned over so that she could read what Susan had written, her eyebrows inching higher and higher.

" _Goodness_ ," she said. "Quite a juicy scandal, indeed!"

"Millie," giggled Susan nervously, but Millie had already seized the cipher from where Susan had left it and was gleefully scribbling down the rest of the decryption. " _Millie_ , we shouldn't."

"Why not?" Millie challenged her without looking up.

"Just think what Jean would say if she found..."

"Oh, Jean's got infinitely more important things to worry about, I promise you," Millie said scornfully. "I'll also wager that she wouldn't be nearly as scandalised as you are. Here we go."

Millie sat up with the deciphered page in her hand, and began to read it to herself, her mouth pressed into a smile that only broadened the further down the page she got.

"What is it?" Lucy finally ventured to ask.

"An _extremely_ detailed account of an evening that Anne Lister spent with Ann Walker," Millie told her. "Leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, mechanically speaking. I'd do a dramatic reading, but Susan here might faint, mightn't you, Susan?"

"Put it away, Millie," said Susan quietly.

Millie's grin faltered, and she turned to look at Susan, who had her knees curled up to her chest again and her eyes cast down to the ground.

"I'm only teasing you, Susan, surely you can..."

"I'm serious, Millie, put it away," Susan repeated. "I'm turning in."

She rose without looking at Millie and crawled into her bed without changing into her night clothes. Millie's gaze followed her, and Lucy had never before seen her exuberant friend look so wounded. Twice, Millie made a nearly imperceptible gesture, as if to reach out and tap Susan on the shoulder, but finally she instead pushed herself off the floor with a sigh, her face solemn.

"Bedtime for me, too," she said in her melodious, husky voice. "Night, Lucy darling. Don't let the bedbugs bite."

"Night," Lucy replied in a small voice as Millie leaned down and kissed the top of Lucy's head, before climbing into her own bed and turning out the light.

Lucy continued to sit on the floor for some time after, wondering what was going on in her friends' thoughts, waiting and waiting for Millie and Susan's breathing to settle into the soft, even rhythm of slumber. Finally, when she couldn't stand it any longer, she seized an air raid torch from under her bed, picked up the deciphered sheet of paper, and climbed into her own bed, pulling the blanket over her head like a tent.

Well.

Millie had certainly been right, that Anne Lister left nothing at all to the imagination. Lucy wasn't even sure she knew what some of the more florid language referred to, but she felt a flush rising to her cheeks regardless. When she finished the page, she turned off her torch, placed it and the page on the ground beside her bed, and pulled her blanket up to her neck. She lay there for a long while, quite still, turning over notions in her head, feeling very warm and almost uncomfortable as she imagined what it would be like to be Ann Walker, to live with a woman as brilliant as Anne Lister, and for Anne Lister frequently be so overcome by her passion that she'd...

(Lucy decided it was much simpler to fall asleep than to continue thinking about anything along these lines, and so, with a bit of effort, she did, long before either Susan or Millie managed.)

The fun had sizzled out of their conspiracy by the next morning. For a few days after, Susan refused to make eye contact with Millie, let alone any physical contact. Miss McBrien, who had a sharp eye for anything and everything, quickly noticed the visible gap between the usually inseparable friends, and quietly asked Lucy if she knew what had gone wrong. And Lucy stared at Miss McBrien wide-eyed, because of course she _could_ have explained that they'd been codebreaking non-classified materials for fun, and there was no harm to it. But the truth was that Lucy couldn't figure out why, the instant they'd broken Anne Lister's code, a new one seemed to have sprung up in its place between her friends, one that Lucy couldn't even begin to decipher.

"Hmm." Miss McBrien pursed her lips pensively as she watched Susan pointedly ignore a resigned Millie across the room. "Well, time heals all wounds, I suppose. I'll worry if it lasts more than a week."

Which it didn't, thankfully. By then, Millie and Susan seemed to have patched things up on whatever terms were acceptable to both of them. They clearly had reinstated their previous closeness by the time accommodations were shuffled a few months later and the two opted to move into a two-person bedroom in a nearby house together, even before "Diederich" brought them all even closer than Lucy would have dreamed possible. Miss McBrien seemed pleased that she wouldn't have to reorganise a team that clearly worked so well together, and even more pleased when her gamble on said team paid off in spades. With such a victory, all thoughts of the diaries—and whatever tensions they had created—quickly faded from Susan and Millie's memories.

But Lucy didn't forget Anne Lister, couldn't forget her, not with her mind that seized onto details and held them tight forever. Under her blanket tent at night, using Susan's cipher, she gradually decoded the other pages that she had committed to memory, greedily pored over Anne Lister's words, imagined over and over that she was Ann Walker, that someone as incandescent as Anne Lister could ever care so deeply for her. When the war ended, and sweet, shy Harry returned a dramatically changed man, Lucy clung to such fantasies all the more tightly with every tear that quietly coursed over a cut lip or bruised cheekbone. The pages of code blazed before her eyes, but she buried her longing under layers and layers of silence.

Until nine years later, when the women that made up Lucy's composite of Anne Lister burst back into her life: Susan, with her steady gaze and figures whirling fantastically about her analytical mind; Jean, confident and controlled, steeliness and stoicism only just concealing her compassion; Millie, a vivacious blur of language and wit and laughter moving almost too quickly to catch. Lucy had sustained herself for so long on strands of crypthand and the half-remembered whirring of Bombe rotors that, for a moment, she could scarcely believe her eyes. But no, they were there, more real and tangible than Anne Lister ever could be.

Lucy's friends swept her back into their old systems of ciphers and analyses, of diligently working shoulder-to-shoulder to save lives, of quietly placing complete and total trust in one another's skills. After a time, Lucy realised that not one, but _three_ women just as fascinating and incandescent as Anne Lister had always been there for her, had always cared deeply for her and valued her. And Lucy knew they always would.

**Author's Note:**

> By the way, for anyone interested, a full key for Anne Lister's crypthand is available [here](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3QT2z16RXhfxSDn1mrbRNVp/the-real-diaries-of-anne-lister). Have at, cryptography nerds.


End file.
